RICK HOLMES: Politics undermines support for higher education

UConn2:Students move between classes and construction sites at University of Connecticut. Photo by Rick Holmes

Yale2:

Looking in on a dining hall on Yale's stately campus in New Haven, Conn. Photo by Rick Holmes

Rick Holmes

STORRS, Conn. - My college days were nearly a lifetime ago, but even now, ona bright September day when there’s a hint of autumn in the air, I feel like I shouldbe back on campus.

This year, I followed that impulse, heading back to two schools where Ispent time in my restless youth. I wanted to see what’s up with college these days.To hear some people talk, things are a mess. Liberal professors are indoctrinatingstudents with their radical agendas; “snowflake” students are cowering in safespaces to escape gender-insensitive pronouns; free speech is under assault, at leastfree speech by prominent conservatives.

A lot of people are buying that vision of campus life. A Pew Researchsurvey released this summer found that 58 percent of Republicans believe thatcolleges and universities “have a negative impact” on the country. That’s up from37 percent just two years ago. Support among Democrats has held steady, with 72percent saying colleges and universities have a positive impact.

This is what happens when you turn higher education into a politicalfootball.

I didn’t see a destructive force when I got back to University of Connecticut40-something years after I left. Nor did I find it at Yale, the Ivy League bastion anhour south. I saw young people doing their best to make themselves, and the worldthey will inherit, better.

UConn has the best women’s basketball program on the planet, and the agschool has a creamery that by itself is worth a visit to Storrs. Otherwise it’s atypical, sprawling state university, with multiple missions. I found lots of newbuildings – some parts of campus were unrecognizable – but most of the old onesare still there, reeking of memories.

The students, though, look much the same as I remember, only with morediversity and more tattoos. They are nearly identical to earlier generations ofstudents in the attribute that matters most: their age.

People who fret about what’s happening on campus today need to rememberthat universities are communities where adolescents outnumber the adults. Bynature, adolescents are prone to reckless behavior, ideological extremism, identityconfusion and binge drinking. I bet half of all campus controversies - whether it’s

a hazing outrage or a political correctness run amok – start with the excess and badjudgment that comes with youth.

When commentators playing to partisan crowds get all worked up over crazywords coming from the mouths of 20-year- olds, we shouldn’t assume the sound-byte is either important or representative of anyone but the speaker. We ought tosupport young people and listen to them, but not necessarily take everything theysay seriously.

There are more than 23,600 undergrads at UConn, and none of them arethere to play politics. They are studying accounting, and engineering and pre-med,making themselves into teachers, business managers, cops and chemists. Don’t tellthem what they are doing is having a negative effect on the country.

The undergrads at Yale may have more money and higher SAT scores, butthey are just as capable of immaturity. They, too, are here to learn, and they taketheir responsibility to the future – their own and their country’s – seriously.

The college-as-liberal-indoctrination myth is an insult to both the studentsand their professors. Students are being exposed to new ideas of all kinds andlearning how to think about them. That’s what education is all about.

It’s also an insult to conservative students and professors. Consider the31,000 students at Bible colleges. Are they being “indoctrinated” by theirconservative-leaning professors? Besides, politics is a tiny part of the curriculum,and who cares who the physics professor voted for?

There are problems in American higher education that deserve broad publicdebate. It’s much too expensive. Students graduate deep in debt, and too manynever graduate at all. High schools put most everyone on a college track, whilejobs in the skilled trades go unfilled. Young people don’t come out of college withthe job-keeping skills they need to succeed.

Too many kids go to college because it’s what happens after high school.They spend more time worrying about getting into college than thinking aboutwhat they want to learn. When they get to college, they find a party culture thatwastes their time, distorts their priorities and sometimes kills.

We need different higher education models, and a more thoughtful approachto picking the model that best suits each high school graduate. If people off-campus want to debate what’s happening on-campus, there’s plenty of substance totalk about.

But let’s not make higher education a casualty of partisan politics or media-fueled culture wars. It’s just too important.

Correction: In a recent column I shortchanged Montana. Currentestimates rank it as more populous than five states.